A Very British Coup

by Chris Mullin

  Barry Clwyd was a younger man than the rest, in his mid-thirties. He represented South Wales. There was no love lost between him and Reg Smith. Smith had been through the rule book in search of reasons to declare Clwyd’s election invalid. “What I don’t understand,” said Clwyd, “is why we can’t go to arbitration. Why is the general secretary so keen on industrial action all of a sudden?”

  “You’re the one that’s supposed to be a revolutionary,” sneered Smith.

  “If you’d let me finish, Brother Smith,” Clwyd’s lilting Welsh voice contrasted with the harsh tones of the general secretary. “Everyone here knows that if there were a ballot tomorrow our members would vote overwhelmingly against this work-to-rule.”

  “You’re out of order.” It was Smith again. “Under the rules a ballot is only required before strike action. A work-to-rule is the responsibility of the executive.”

  This time Clwyd did not attempt to respond. He knew from experience that it was useless to argue. Few executive members could be swayed by argument. The rest took their cue from the general secretary. Three other members contributed to the discussion. Two for, one against. Then Smith took the vote. There were only three dissenters. “Right then, brothers, that’s it.” Smith stood up. “We take action from midnight.”

  Picking up his file he walked to the window. Far below, the lights were coming on all over London. The Euston Road was gummed with traffic. A train sounded its two-tone horn as it pulled into St Pancras. “Pity Downing Street has its own generator,” said Smith quietly, “otherwise I’d pull the plug myself.”

  *

  After the executive meeting broke up Smith spent an hour dictating a memorandum on the conduct of the work-to-rule for circulation to all district officers of the union. He also issued a terse statement to the Press Association blaming the dispute on the intransigence of the government which, he said, was refusing to allow the Electricity Board to negotiate freely.

  He was then driven to Victoria Station. The pavements were thick with snow pounded to slush by the footfalls of rush-hour crowds. Along the Strand an automatic salt-spreader was stuck in a traffic jam. The last of the day’s commuters, bent double against a cruel wind, trickled into Charing Cross. Newspaper vendors sought refuge from the cold in shop doorways. At Victoria, Smith dismissed the chauffeur, waited until the car was out of sight then walked briskly away from the station and into Buckingham Palace Road. He crossed the road and continued in the direction of St James’s Park, perusing the shop fronts as he went. After about two hundred yards he came to a halt outside a restaurant called Bumbles. Reaching in the pocket of his overcoat he drew out a piece of paper and checked the name against a scribbled address. Then, looking to the right and left, he pushed open the door and entered.

  The American, who was already seated at a table towards the rear of the restaurant with an evening newspaper spread before him looked up when Smith entered. He was wearing a white raincoat, open at the front, the one he had worn when he had last met Fiennes of DI5 in the coffee shop of the Churchill Hotel.

  “Jim.” Smith bore down upon the American, his right hand extended.

  “Reg.” The American was on his feet now. A waiter took Smith’s overcoat and scarf. His heavy briefcase he placed on the floor by the table. “I see you boys are in the headlines.” The American indicated the front page of the paper he had been perusing. The headline story was about the impending power dispute. Smith turned the paper towards him and glanced at the story which included a rather unflattering picture of himself taken at a press conference two weeks earlier.

  The waiter fussed around them. Did they want apéritifs? The American already had a Scotch and Smith ordered the same. He specified Chivas Regal; nothing was too good for the working classes.

  “To victory,” said the American raising his glass.

  “Victory,” said Smith, his heavy jowls emitting a modest smile. Victory over whom or what, they did not say.

  The American was Jim Chambers, first secretary, political section, at the embassy. The British Labour movement was his brief. He had a caseload of middle-rank Labour MPs and trade union leaders. His job was to pinpoint rising stars and get in close. It was all above board, so far at least. In the three years he had served in Britain, Chambers had become a familiar face in the bars at Labour party conferences and TUC congresses. Every snippet of information or gossip he had carefully noted and filed away. As a result he had identified the drift to the left in the Labour Party long before it had become apparent to his masters in Washington. At least three members of the new régime were regular guests at the dinner parties Chambers held at his home in Connaught Square. He had entered into the spirit of his job. Many was the drunken evening he had spent with his arm around a Labour politician singing the Red Flag or a chorus of Avanti Popolo.

  Chambers was an old hand. His earlier assignments had included spells in El Salvador and Portugal. President Ford had claimed that saving Portugal from Communism was one of the achievements of his presidency. Jim Chambers had played his part.

  Now Chambers was in London. He had thought he was in for a quiet life. At least there won’t be a revolution in England, they had joked with him in the State Department, when he was posted. Little did they know. But Chambers was ready. He had been one of the few to tip a victory for Perkins. Now he was one of the few to predict that Perkins would not last the course.

  Chambers had assembled his British caseload with precision. It offered him contacts in every significant faction of the Labour movement. He even had a contact on the central committee of the British Communist Party. It was he who had set up Reg Smith’s visit to the United States three years earlier. He had persuaded Smith to attend the conferences at Ditchley. The beauty of it was that no money had changed hands and no one had done anything they would have to lie about. His only outlay had been the occasional bottle of Scotch, the odd expenses-paid tour of the States and a little harmless entertaining.

  They started with oysters washed down with white wine. Duck in orange sauce followed. “What exactly is a ‘work-to-rule’?” asked Chambers. “We don’t have them on my side of the Atlantic.”

  “A work-to-rule,” said Smith in between mouthfuls of duck and spinach, “means that my members will do exactly what is in their contracts and no more. There will be no overtime worked, all productivity agreements will be cancelled and, if someone is off sick, no one else will do his job.”

  “How long before it bites?”

  Smith wiped a trickle of orange sauce from his jaw with a napkin. “The lights will start to go out within two or three days. By the end of the first week there will be lay-offs in the factories. Within a fortnight the government will have disaster on its hands.”

  Chambers had finished eating and pushed his plate to the middle of the table. “How long will it last?”

  “Until we win.”

  “Is your executive behind you?” Chambers sat with his forearms resting on the table.

  “More or less.” Smith served himself another helping of spinach from a tureen in the middle of the table. “A couple of them cut up rough. Wanted to know why I was pushing a strike now when I advised against when the Tories were in.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I gave them the usual.” The waiter removed Chambers’ finished plate and the vegetable dish. “Five years of restraint under the Tories. Power workers now are well down the wages’ league. Time we caught up.”

  This was not by any means the whole story. The truth was that Reg Smith hated Harry Perkins. For years he and other right-wing trade union leaders had worked to keep the Labour Party in the hands of the moderates. Labour leaders had looked to Smith to deliver a majority of the trade union block vote on crucial issues at the party conference. And for years Smith and his friends had delivered.

  The reward for loyal service had been an unending flow of quangos and honours doled out by a grateful Labour Party establishment. For tame trade union leaders there were seat
s on the boards of nationalised industries and places on the vast array of public authorities, committees, commissions and enquiries that were in the gift of a reigning Prime Minister. The ultimate accolade, and one upon which Smith had set his sights, was retirement to the House of Lords.

  The election of Perkins had put an end to all that. Under Perkins the Labour Party was pledged to abolish the honours system and whatever public appointments were going, Smith could not expect to benefit.

  Reg Smith was a bitter man and the focus of his bitterness was Harry Perkins. He wanted to see Perkins humiliated, and closing down the power stations seemed the best way of going about it.

  “The advantage of a work-to-rule,” he said as the coffee arrived, “is that we don’t have to cough up any strike pay because our members will still be drawing their wages. If we had an all-out strike, our funds would dry up in two weeks. With a work-to-rule we can hold out indefinitely and inflict maximum damage.”

  12

  Reg Smith proved spot-on in his estimate that the work-to-rule would start to bite within three days. The coal-fired power stations were the first to go out of service. They consumed up to twenty thousand tons of coal a day and required constant maintenance. Each boiler and generator was serviced by a team consisting of a leader, an assistant and several attendants. Under the terms of the work-to-rule, if one man did not turn up, the rest of the team stopped work and gradually the huge boilers became clogged with clinker.

  The Littlebrook station on the south side of the Thames estuary was the first to be hit. By noon on the third day the manager reported that his number five boiler had accumulated a thousand tonnes of slag. He would have to close it down. Once the boiler cooled and the slag solidified it would take a team of men with pneumatic drills ten days to clear. Every boiler that closed down meant a 500 megawatt generator out of service and the supply of electricity to the national grid reduced accordingly. Within twenty-four hours of the Littlebrook shutdown, coal-fired stations at Pembroke, Didcot, West Burton and Battersea had each closed down a boiler. By the end of the first week the national grid had lost twenty per cent of its capacity. All that week the temperature hardly rose above freezing. It was the coldest January on record. Demand for electricity had never been higher. Smith could hardly have picked a better time.

  As the boilers were closed down, the blackouts began. At the Grid Switching Centre in Streatham sweat was glistening on the brow of control engineer Wally Bates as he snapped out orders to men in white overalls who sat in a circle around the edge of the room before a bank of dials and switches. “Give it back to Lambeth, take out Putney and Southwark.” As he spoke he scribbled calculations on a notepad.

  One of the four telephones rang. He reached for it without looking up. “Yup,” he barked. It was the West London Hospital. They were in the middle of a major operation and having trouble with the emergency generator. Could he spare them for another hour? He promised to do his best and before he replaced the receiver another phone was ringing. It was the Control Centre at East Grinstead. Could he save another fifty megawatts? They were running low. He groaned. Why didn’t they ask St Albans? He already had two boroughs in darkness.

  He slammed down the phone, tapped a series of numbers into his calculator and entered the answer on a sheet attached to a clipboard in front of him. Then he shouted, “Tell Horseferry Road to stand by for shutdown in one hour.” He permitted himself the merest trace of a grin. The Horseferry Road sub-station took in the House of Commons and most government ministries.

  The phone rang. It was East Grinstead again. No, St Albans were already taking more than their share. He would have to take out another London borough. More tapping on the calculator. More scribbling on his clipboard. “Tell Wandsworth to stand by in one hour,” he barked. Then, drawing a handkerchief from his trouser pocket, he wiped his forehead. “Jesus,” he said to himself, “this is only the first week.”

  The Cabinet went into emergency session the morning after the work-to-rule began. Everyone was agreed that the demands of the power workers could not be met. “We’ll have every bleeding union in the country at our throats if we give in to this one,” growled Jock Steeples.

  The Energy Secretary, Albert Sampson, reported on the likely effects if the dispute dragged on. Sampson was a Yorkshire miner. He owed his place in the Cabinet more to a feeling that the miners ought to be represented than to his ability. Even before the dispute there were those who had questioned whether Sampson was up to the job. “According to my Department,” Sampson read ponderously from the brief in front of him, “normal demand at this season of the year is around 50,000 megawatts. So far we have lost about 9,000 megawatts generating capacity. Some of that can be absorbed by surplus capacity but next week we can expect to lose double that.”

  As Sampson droned on Perkins’ attention wandered. He had always regarded Reg Smith as a malicious bastard, but this took the biscuit. In ten years of Tory government Smith had never even threatened industrial action, yet within weeks of a Labour victory he was suddenly posing as a super-militant. Sampson was now listing the emergency measures recommended by his department to conserve electricity. A five-inch limit on bathwater, powers to limit illuminated advertising, shop-window lighting and floodlights at football matches. And if the dispute went into a third week, they would have to put industry on a three-day week.

  Outside, the sky was grey. A chill wind whipped up snowflakes which whirled against the windows of the Cabinet Room. Wainwright was calling for a state of emergency. If necessary troops would have to be used to run the power stations.

  “Hang on a minute,” said Perkins, “if you think I’m flying up to Balmoral to get the King’s signature on a bit of paper allowing a Labour government to use troops against the power workers, you can think again. We’d be a bloody laughing stock if we fell for that one.” There was a general murmur of agreement around the table and Wainwright, seeing that he was outnumbered, did not press the point.

  It was agreed that Perkins should ask the TUC General Secretary to try and bring the power workers’ union to the negotiating table. The army would be asked to make available generators for hospitals. The Cabinet Office would be asked to draft emergency legislation giving the government temporary powers to restrict the use of electricity for consideration by the next Cabinet meeting. In the meantime the Civil Contingencies Committee would be asked to advise on further measures.

  *

  Jonathan Alford was the first to arrive at Sir George Fison’s home in Cheyne Walk. A Philippine maid in a black dress answered the door. Alford hovered in the hallway while the maid disappeared with his coat and scarf. “Sir’s in the drawing room,” she said on her return. Alford followed her up the stairs to the first floor. The wall was lined with prints of eighteenth-century London. There was one of Park Lane in the days when it was a lane and the only traffic were carriages bearing ladies with parasols. Another showed Westminster Abbey viewed from a field in Millbank at about the spot which is now the headquarters of Imperial Chemical Industries.

  The maid pushed open the ornate double doors that led from the first-floor landing and then stood aside to let Alford pass. The drawing room, which extended from front to back of the house, was illuminated by table lamps, one on the marble mantelpiece and two on low coffee tables in the left-hand corner. Fison, brandy glass in hand, was standing alone by the front window, apparently gazing at the traffic on the Embankment. He turned as Alford entered and lumbered towards him, hand outstretched.

  “You’d be the chap from the BBC,” said Fison in his poor imitation of an upper-class accent. Alford nodded. The maid lingered. “Get Mr Alford a drink,” snapped Fison in the harsher tone he reserved for addressing servants.

  “A whisky and ginger, please,” said Alford relinquishing Fison’s weak handshake.

  “Glad you could come. Peregrine Craddock told me you could be relied upon. Just as well. Reliable chaps are thin on the ground at the Beeb, these days.” Alford’s chest swe
lled. He was flattered to think that he should be known to the chief of DI5. The little Philippine maid presented his whisky and withdrew in silence. As they drifted towards the window, Fison rumbled on about left-wing extremists who seemed to be running the BBC these days. Alford contributed only the occasional nod.

  Downstairs the doorbell rang again. Fison was still denouncing extremists in the BBC when the maid reappeared to announce the editor of The Times. In the ten minutes that followed Alford found himself being introduced to the owners or editors of just about every newspaper in Fleet Street. There was also the chairman of the Independent Broadcasting Authority and the editor of Independent Television News. My goodness, thought Alford, this is for real.

  Like his father before him Alford’s view of the world was fashioned by Winchester, Oxford and in the Guards. It was at Oxford that he had first become aware of the extremist menace. He saw how Communists and Trotskyites wormed their way into the Oxford Union. How they used the union debating society as a platform for promoting their extremist views and how easily ordinary students were misled by smooth-talking agitators. It was at Oxford that he first resolved to do whatever he could to resist the rising tide of extremism. Alford’s opportunity came when his tutor offered to put him in touch with “someone in the right line of business”.

  The result was an interview with a man from London who gave his name as Mr Spencer and who left a telephone number where he could be contacted at any time. The number connected with the switchboard at the Department of Trade, but led in fact to an office in the West End. Alford used to ring the number about once a month with snippets on who was organising meetings on Ireland and demonstrations against the military régime in Chile. He also reported on Iranian students organising opposition to the Shah.